


blind spot

by entrecote



Category: Kaiji
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-20
Updated: 2012-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-17 00:54:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entrecote/pseuds/entrecote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>big money talks big. so do big dreamers. kaiji can't bring himself to trust sahara.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blind spot

It’s barely been a couple of days since they’ve quit their jobs at the convenience store and received Endou’s invitation to the gambling party. Another day that Kaiji goes without working is another day without income, though, so he sucks it up and hops from store to store, hoping that somewhere, help is needed with sorting out pre-made bentos or taking out the trash or anything, really. It was admittedly pretty stupid of him to have quit over a petty quarrel, but then again, if the manager really had checked his bags that time and discovered the stolen cash, he would have gotten the sack on the spot anyway.

And there’s nobody to blame for that except Sahara, who, other than having planted his loot with Kaiji and gotten him the sack in the first place, has taken to shamelessly following him everywhere, stationed outside his apartment in the mornings and stalking him all through the day, sometimes even barging into the quiet comfort of his own home without invitation (if a messy, musty apartment that hasn’t been cleaned in years could constitute anything of comfort). Kaiji hasn’t tried to ward him off, even though he’s completely annoying; he’s realised, over the past two days, that trying to stop someone as persistent and with skin as thick as Sahara’s would just be a waste of energy.

“Well,” Sahara asks, lighting up, “Wanna try the next one?”

“Forget it. I’m going home to sleep,” Kaiji tells him, walking out of the convenience store.

“Aww, wait up,” Sahara says, tracing his footsteps, “we haven’t had dinner yet.”

“Do you actually need to get a job, Kaiji-san,” he mumbles after a while, mouth muffled around his cigarette, the smell of smoke leaden in the warm night air. “It’s only a couple of weeks more. Even if we don’t win that twenty million, we’ll probably get a neat sum out of it anyway.”

“Listen to yourself speak. Do you seriously think it’s that easy?” Kaiji replies, annoyed. “And for the last time, leave me alone and go home.”

Behind them, a rush of cold air escapes the automated doors of the convenience store, which are chiming a fond, tinny farewell as someone else exits. Kaiji can feel the hairs on his neck stand.

 

*

 

“Know what I really wanted to be,” Sahara comments offhandedly, crunching on the ice cubes from his glass of Coke. “A track star or something. Like the ones on TV during the Olympics. But I never got picked for first team, so it was kind of impossible, you know? I liked running, but that didn’t mean I was actually any good at it.”

“You gonna need some more rice?” the cook asks gruffly.

“No, thanks,” Kaiji replies, and shovels the rest of the curry down his throat. It tastes a little like plastic and stale refrigerator air.

Sahara just turned twenty-one a couple of months ago. He could have gone to college, really, but in the end he decided higher education just didn’t cut it and fucked up high school on purpose so he wouldn’t qualify. It was an early and easy decision. According to him, his best subjects were Japanese and Mathematics, but the word “best” came with the qualifier that in order to get a good passing grade, he had to put in more effort than what was worth. So that was that. After he graduated, he moved out and started working odd jobs. The longest one actually lasted a year and a month, which was, by his standards, some sort of miracle. The pay wasn’t actually a problem as long as he had enough to get by, and the most important thing was that he had enough time to lark around after work or on weekends or something. Basically, most things often weren’t worth the trouble they required of anybody because of the disproportionately low payoff involved. If Sahara was going to strike, he wanted to strike it big.

“Come to think of it,” Sahara continues, looking into his glass as if the key to the universe was in the bottom of it, right in the middle of all that melted ice and linty bits from the washcloth, “I’m not really good at anything, huh? Or maybe I just have that exceptional talent for not being good at anything? In which case I’m probably really, really talented. You and I both, Kaiji-san. World’s best loafers. Champions of the Famicon.”

Kaiji digs out a 500-yen coin from the pocket of his jeans and places it on the counter, next to his empty plate.

“Pick up your own tab,” he tells Sahara and gets up from his seat.

“Kaiji-san,” Sahara laughs, fishing out his wallet, “Kaiji-san, you’re the worst, you know that?”

 

*

 

This is where most of his dreams take place these days: he’s always in a dark room, crawling along on his arms and feet, and the room reeks with the salt of tears and sweat. Sometimes he’s clothed. Sometimes he’s naked. Sometimes the men in black suits come to tear his clothes off him. Once or twice Andou and Furuhata show up, leering at him from behind full, frothy mugs of murky, yellow beer, and it always ends with him being dragged away by his feet, chest flat against the floor, nails scratching lines of dust into the cement. He tends to wake up right before they’re about to shut a pair of heavy wooden doors on him, the lights and the buzz of the Espoir fading out in the background, as if from a faraway place. In the time that he takes to recover from his heart pounding a mile a minute, sweating furiously into his clothes, he wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t woken up right there and then. He could guess how it all ends, sure, but he doesn’t want to.

 

*

 

“You need to smile more, Kaiji-san,” Sahara notes one particularly bleary afternoon while they’re walking down a street, side by side, on the way to nowhere in particular. The job hunt had died a lonely death two days ago, after that last trip to a Lawson’s. “You’ll die early if you’re glum all the time, you know. Like of a heart attack or something.”

“Not in the mood,” Kaiji tells him.

“I know why you’re so down,” Sahara says with the air of a wise man. “It’s because you’re being chased, isn’t it? Man, it must be hard on your nerves, that feeling of not knowing when people are just gonna come for you. Like, they could just come in the middle of the night and bam, break down your door and drag you out of bed and take you somewhere far away or something, never to be seen again. Maybe chop off your fingers or a limb or two, or sell your organs for some petty change.”

“Don’t talk about things like that so lightly, idiot.” 

“I have a solution,” Sahara continues. “All we have to do is hang out all day long, and if they ever come for you, I’ll be able to fend them off.”

“Yeah? And how are you gonna do that?”

“Stand in front of them and block their way, of course. I’ll do it while you make your dramatic escape. But you’ll have to be quick, because they’ll be armed and I’ll probably only last twenty seconds, max. Shit, they’ll probably gun me down, won’t they? But let’s pretend they won’t. And then after you escape to a safe place you can give me a call or something from a public phone to tell me you’re okay.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

Sahara follows Kaiji right back to his apartment and slips in as naturally as a thief in the night, even going the extra mile with a lazy “I’m back” the moment he steps in and trades his sneakers for a spare pair of house slippers. Belatedly Kaiji starts to think that Sahara might just be an imaginary friend he’s dreamed up if Sahara’s tailing him this easily. It’s weird, because you tend to actually be friendly with your imaginary friends, since they’re meant to be friends, but it’s reached the point where Kaiji would rather have his measly apartment seized by a team of bloodthirsty Teiai yes-men than spend another second with Sahara. And yet.

“One more round,” Kaiji suggests when Sahara wins his fifth game of blackjack in a row. “Just one round. If I win, quit bugging me.”

Sahara puts down his beer and makes a face at Kaiji.

“Yeah, why not,” he replies, reaching for the cards. “If you want it that way.”

There is a cocksure look on Sahara’s face as he shuffles the deck. Kaiji isn’t sure where Sahara gets all that confidence; he’s never seen Sahara look troubled by anything in the slightest, not in the way that it meant anything to him. It bothers Kaiji. Maybe it’s because Sahara’s never had to face real danger before – because he’s never been threatened with imminent death or injury or incapacitation – that losing isn’t that big of a deal to him at all. Or maybe he hasn’t bet anything in a gamble that was worth losing. Either way, it just rubs him the wrong way.

Kaiji is dealt a pair of sevens.

“Hit or stand?” Sahara asks casually, staring at the pair in his own hands.

“Hit,” Kaiji tells him. It’s a two of spades.

“Hit or stand?” Sahara asks again.

Kaiji hesitates for a moment. “Stand.”

“Huh, okay,” Sahara replies. “My turn, then.”

He swipes one card from the deck, then another, in quick succession. Then he fans out the cards in his hands, glaring at them in almost mock-seriousness, regards Kaiji over the top of his cards, then returns to staring at them again.

“Bust?” Kaiji asks, setting down his cards, a grand total of sixteen, which is pretty far away from the target. Sahara lets out a sigh and shows his hand. A four, an ace, a queen, and then a seven of hearts, making for a total of twenty-two.

“Damn,” he frowns, “I was so close too.”

Kaiji finds Sahara lounging around downstairs the next morning anyway, smoking like a chimney, and figures out that empty promises really are what Sahara’s good at giving. Small wonder.

 

*

 

Of course, Sahara doesn’t just visit Kaiji the next day. He goes over the day after next, and the day after that, and the day after as well, as he did before. If anything it just goes to show how seriously Sahara takes Kaiji, which is not seriously at all. It pisses Kaiji off, but half of it is probably his own fault. If he actually grew some balls maybe he’d be able to stop Sahara from eating McNuggets and fries out of a paper bag on his floor. If he actually grew some balls maybe he’d be living in a decent apartment with a full-time job and hopefully without a beer habit.

“McDonald’s is expensive?” Sahara asks incredulously. “You think fucking _McDonald’s_ is expensive?”

“There’re better things I could be spending that money on,” Kaiji says.

Sahara is a shitty acquaintance. The only things he cares about are having fun and eating. These are things that Kaiji’s trying to limit, taking into account the total number of zeroes in the debt he still owes, so having Sahara around him half the time isn’t helping things. Sahara drags him to bars and snack houses and game arcades. He’s unexpectedly good at all these stupid little games, mostly winning small sums that are a little more than what he puts in. Even though he buys Kaiji a drink every time he lucks out, not staying in results in Kaiji spending more money than he originally would have. Sahara doesn’t pay for Kaiji’s cigarettes or his food. Sahara doesn’t pay Kaiji’s bills, which he can’t already afford to pay himself. Every time he watches Sahara exchange a lottery ticket for cash, he wishes he’d stayed at home in the first place.

“I’m pretty lucky, huh,” Sahara yells over all the noise in the pachinko parlour as his machine feeds out rows of shiny, silver balls.

“What? I can’t hear you,” Kaiji replies, relying on the cigarette in his mouth for some resilience and fortitude.

“I said, I’m pretty lucky,” Sahara shouts again.

“I’m leaving,” Kaiji says, getting up from his own machine. All it ever did for the past one hour was eat up all his money. He’s too hungry to function, anyway.

 

*

 

It’s late. The shops down the street are all closed except for a couple of shady pubs, so the streets are relatively empty, except for a couple of people making their way home. Kaiji lights a cigarette as he watches a man in a suit stumble his way out of a particularly smoky, seedy-looking joint, a woman in a short, tight dress clinging to his arms. She’s completely flat, and he looks like he’s about to throw up.

“Light me up too, Kaiji-san,” Sahara says, looking at the lighter in Kaiji’s hand.

“Can’t you do it yourself,” Kaiji mutters as Sahara retrieves his pack from his own back pocket and fishes out a cigarette.

“No, guess not,” Sahara replies.

They stop under a lamppost. Sahara’s all uncharacteristically still when Kaiji lights the cigarette between his lips. There’s smoke in their faces from the one Kaiji is already smoking, and it makes Kaiji’s eyes sting, but even through the smoke Kaiji can tell that Sahara’s looking at him, and not at the cigarette when one normally would, his gaze unusually focused. Sahara’s bending over just so slightly so that the cigarette meets the lighter where the flame is, his hands in his pockets, and because Kaiji’s not used to being scrutinised this closely, his hand shakes. The flame quivers. When he’s done lighting Sahara up he finds that his palms are sweaty. He stuffs the lighter back into his pocket and turns away.

Sahara is still staring at Kaiji, disconcertingly so, when Kaiji finally turns back to face him, just staring at his face as if wondering what to do with it. His cheeks hollow around the cigarette, and then he blows out the smoke in a long, grey column.

“What is it, something on my face? Quit staring,” Kaiji says. He’s starting to get nervy. Sahara blinks, as if mulling over something, and takes another long drag.

“Ahh, fuck this,” he says finally, throwing his cigarette onto the ground and stepping on it with surprising viciousness, grinding it in. Then he grabs Kaiji by the shoulders, yanks the cigarette out of his mouth and kisses him.

It’s not very romantic. Getting kissed by a man doesn’t fit into Kaiji’s definition of romantic in the first place, so having his legs forced apart by Sahara’s knee and his back slammed suddenly and painfully up against a steel shutter along the roadside is a little hard to swallow, almost humiliating. Sahara is younger, but that doesn’t stop him from being stronger, rougher, more aggressive, and incredibly hard to shake off. His hands are moving steadily off of Kaiji’s shoulders, down his sides, around his waist and up his shirt, and all Kaiji can do is to try to push Sahara away, but that only seems to encourage Sahara, so he gives up and ends up leaning into the kiss. Shit, he’s going to regret this tomorrow. Everything smells like smoke, like hot dead summer air, and Sahara tastes fucking disgusting, like an amalgamation of nicotine and concrete and hot, wet, sticky days-old beer. His lips are rough and chapped and feel like scales.

“Kaiji-san,” Sahara says, breaking away from the kiss to speak into Kaiji’s ear, voice muffled, “let’s go back to your apartment.”

“Yeah,” Kaiji agrees without thinking, “okay.” He can feel the blood rushing through his veins.

 

*

 

Sahara is great at sucking cock. Not that Kaiji’s been on the receiving end of any oral sex in his entire life to begin with, so there really isn’t a yardstick for comparison, but if it feels good then it feels good and there’s really nothing much to argue about. And right now Sahara’s tongue is moving achingly slow over the head of his cock and he can’t think straight.

Wrapping his hands around Kaiji’s balls and the base of his cock, Sahara starts to swallow. Kaiji’s seen these hands of Sahara’s thousands of times. He’s seen them working the register, wiping the shelves, replacing canned drinks. They’re perfectly normal hands, the perfectly normal hands of a perfectly normal Japanese male, if a little callused in places. It’s surreal.

“You don’t really –” Sahara says, in between sliding cock down his throat and coming up for air and interrupting Kaiji’s train of thought about normal Japanese male hands, “get this often, huh? Kaiji-san.”

“H-huh?” Kaiji croaks out. Embarrassing.

“You’re leaking so much,” Sahara continues, mouth sticky and red. The way he says it reminds Kaiji of AV actresses in cheaply produced pornos, staring down dick as if it was the most amazing thing they’d ever seen, voices high and breathy.

When Kaiji finally does come Sahara’s stroking his cock until he’s spilling semen all over Sahara’s hands, the smell strong and pungent and heady. Sahara’s watching Kaiji with a bored, almost detached look on his face, but for all the indifference he’s putting across, his face is still flushed red, eyes lidded, tongue darting out over his swollen mouth, as if he’s trying to contain all that bee-stung swelling. It makes Kaiji remember how good it felt to have that mouth wrapping warm and wet around his cock, and his cock twitches again.

“Do me too, I’m still hard,” Sahara says as Kaiji catches his breath. He’s pulling wads of tissues out of the tissue box on the table. If he’d done that sometime else, Kaiji would have told him off, but right now his head is reeling with what Sahara just said.

“But I’ve never – with guys –”

“Me neither,” Sahara cuts him off, wiping the sticky mess off his own hands. “Ahh, I totally need a smoke.”

 

*

 

That night Sahara stays over at Kaiji’s, after giving Kaiji his virgin blowjob experience and receiving a reluctant but much-obliged handjob in return. It’s nearly four after he takes a shower (without asking), and he decides he’s too lazy and tired to stumble home just so he can sleep, so he bugs Kaiji until Kaiji gives in and pulls out an extra futon that’s all dusty and yellow. Then he complains a bit about how dusty and yellow the futon is until Kaiji turns off the lights and goes to bed himself. That shuts him up.

Kaiji doesn’t get to sleep a wink after that. He stays awake, his back to Sahara, all the while watching the hands on his alarm clock tick away, fluorescent in the dark. Before he can be sure that Sahara’s dead asleep, he doesn’t dare to turn around, but when Sahara starts snoring, he breathes a quiet sigh, and gradually relaxes. He turns so that he’s lying flat on his back, but he can’t fall asleep in that position either, so he turns again. Now all he’s getting is a close-up view of Sahara’s face. It’s quiet out but the cats on the street just outside his apartment are yowling (probably fucking), in the early hours of the morning. Sahara snores through all of that, his face expressionless. Kaiji wonders if Sahara’s dreaming. He wonders how Sahara would react if he knew Kaiji was watching him sleep. He wants to know whether Sahara was watching him all the while before he fell asleep. Is that why Sahara is facing his way? A creep like Sahara probably wasn’t past watching anybody sleep, and Kaiji didn’t really want Sahara watching him. He’d done enough watching in the daytime. The cats yowl some more.

Kaiji decides that if he can’t fall asleep, he might as well stay that way, pillowing his head on his arm, watching Sahara shift in his slumber. When the sunlight comes in through the blinds a couple of hours later, hitting his eyes, that’s when he really starts to feel tired.

 

*

 

Sahara is watching him when he wakes up, much like a cat focused intently on its prey. He’s sitting cross-legged in front of Kaiji, hands in his lap, and when Kaiji realises this he sits up hurriedly and tries to pull his blanket over himself to stop Sahara from possibly taking advantage of him when it hits him that, oh, wait, Sahara’s already done that.

“I bought breakfast,” Sahara grins, pointing to the kotatsu. Two FamilyMart plastic bags are sitting on it, looking tired and slumped.

“I’ll go wash up,” Kaiji mumbles, averting his gaze. Whatever happened last night is still fresh in his memory.

“Okay,” Sahara replies brightly, already digging into one of the bags.

“Don’t you have any other friends,” Kaiji asks later, chewing on an onigiri. There’s a measly amount of smoked salmon hidden away in all that rice, but it doesn’t taste half bad.

“Yeah,” Sahara answers, mouth full of microwaved noodles, “but they’re busy working.”

He continues slyly, “You wanna know if I have a girlfriend, right?”

“I couldn’t care less.”

Sahara pauses, giving Kaiji a blank look, then shrugs and returns his attention to his yakisoba. “You’re right. That doesn’t matter.”

They finish the rest of their meal in silence. Maybe it was getting too awkward, but Sahara turns on the television (again, without asking) so that the room is filled with the sound of canned laughter from some variety show rerun. That’s what they show during hours like these, at times like 11 a.m. or 4 p.m., something that doesn’t cost too much to broadcast, like old comedies or edutainment programmes meant for kids, to fill up the spaces between when the real money was being made during the peak hours. Some guy is dressed in a lobster suit and dancing the Macarena, and Sahara is laughing himself silly, even though Kaiji can’t see what’s so funny about it. Sahara, he decides for himself instead, starting on a cold tonkatsu sandwich with some barely-there tonkatsu, would be attractive if his hair wasn’t that too-bright, blinding neon shade of yellow, if he would clean himself up and dress like a gentleman and talk like he was educated. He’s not conventionally handsome, but he’s not ugly either. If he would clean himself up – maybe not a lot of girls – but a couple of girls would definitely be throwing themselves at him.

“How much did that cost?” Kaiji asks, swallowing the last of his sandwich.

“Huh? It’s fine,” Sahara replies with a wave of his hand. “Shit, they’re taking the piss out of the Liberal Democrats.”

“I don’t like being in debt,” Kaiji says pointedly, as some kind of reminder to himself, but Sahara counters, almost too easily, too earnestly, still staring at the TV screen, “No, I owe you.”

 

*

 

It’s been exactly one week and a day since Kaiji got fired. These eight days have been something of a blur, and Kaiji tries to recount the events, holed up in his apartment’s sorry excuse for a bathroom and slowly suffocating himself to death by smoking a whole pack in the small, cramped space. It might just be better than spending the rest of his life trying to pay off a debt he won’t ever see the end of, and it is definitely better than almost certainly ending up in a living hell if he goes along with the plan that Endou suggested.

So in these eight days he’s gotten accused of stealing, gotten fired, gotten propositioned for another shady-sounding gambling party, one of which got him into all of this trouble in the first place, becoming Furuhata’s guarantor notwithstanding. Then Sahara came along and latched onto him and everything he did for a whole week, and then whatever happened last night happened. Kaiji still doesn’t know what possessed him to do it, or even agree to it.

Sahara left a couple of hours ago. He even volunteered to take out all the trash that was left behind after they finished eating. Kaiji can’t find it in himself to go take a shower, even if he feels kind of disgusting and sweaty and grimy all over from the summer heat. All he wants to do is to sit on top of the toilet seat and figure out what he’s going to do next and what he’s going to do with Sahara while committing respiratory suicide.

He figures after what feels like two hours, lighting the final stick in the pack with a slightly shaky hand, that what’s left is for him to decide whether to go to the gambling party or not. Whether Sahara should be going, however, that’s really none of his business. Right from the outset Sahara had been adamant on going, if the number of times he’d said something along the lines of, “Ahh, wish it were next week already,” in the past few days was anything to go by. It’s not as if Kaiji hadn’t tried to warn him – Sahara knows what kind of life Kaiji was having because of Endou’s schemes, has seen for himself the kind of consequences that were coming for somebody who fell into such a glaringly obvious trap headfirst. But it really isn’t his concern at all if Sahara wants to ruin his own life, and it isn’t his place to speak, given his own situation.

He snuffs out the cigarette against a tile on the wall, throws it out the slit that’s meant to be a window, and gets up to rinse his face. The air in the bathroom is still hazy with smoke, and his face is so shrouded in it, he can’t even see his reflection properly in the mirror. He imagines, squinting, that this was what Sahara was looking at when he helped Sahara light up last night, right before Sahara strong-armed a kiss out of him. Although thinking about it still makes his face burn, he can’t help but wonder what that was all about.

That’s because there’s something that he can still admit to himself, no matter how grudgingly: that he’s a loser, that he’s trash, that he’s the scum of society, a complete, total, good-for-nothing bottom feeder who’s stuck in a vicious cycle of alternating self-loathing and overinflated egotism. But there’s something else that he’s less ready to admit: that scum like him can have friends, can deserve to have friends, can deserve to have somebody care, can deserve to have someone like Sahara care. Superficially, of course, since Kaiji’s learnt more about Sahara in the past week than in the whole month during which they were co-workers, and even now Kaiji still doesn’t know much about Sahara other than his name and his job and the brand of beer Sahara likes to drink. He’s sure it’s mutual. The thing is, he still can’t figure out which part of him Sahara is supposed to care about. There’s one obvious answer, and that’s Kaiji’s expertise in participating in life-threatening gambles, which might come in handy in a couple of days, and if that’s really the answer, then Kaiji thinks that he should be relieved. The face that’s staring back at him from the mirror, however, still clouded up by all that smoke, doesn’t seem to be so sure.

 

*

 

“It’s really rare for Kaiji-san to ask me out for a drink,” Sahara quips, scanning the bar quickly. “I’m touched you still remember my phone number. Did something happen? Do you need my help or something?”

Kaiji takes a long swig from his beer. “No,” he replies, swallowing, “nothing in particular.”

“If this is about us touching each other’s dicks –”

“Shut up!”

“I’m kidding,” Sahara says, but his voice drops a notch in volume. “Relax.”

Kaiji pours himself more beer, emptying the can, even though his glass isn’t empty yet. He leaves it untouched, though. Then, still looking at the glass and its bubbling, golden contents, he tells Sahara, “Day after tomorrow. I’m not going. You shouldn’t go either.”

“Hmm? The party? Why not?”

“I’m just telling you what I think,” Kaiji says. “I trusted Endou once and he got me in this mess. You’ve got a life in front of you and you aren’t knee-deep in debt. But you don’t have to take my advice.”

Sahara pulls a face. It’s the same face that he made right before he lost that game of blackjack to Kaiji after a lucky streak, before he bet it away for a promise that he didn’t fulfil anyway. Kaiji realises, only now, that it’s the sceptical kind of face he shows to people he thinks are sceptics, much like an eye for an eye.

“Kaiji-san,” Sahara begins, and his tone is too uncomfortably sincere and too uncomfortably serious to belong to the playful, off-kilter Sahara that Kaiji is used to, “I don’t know what kind of person you think I am, but there are some things that I’m willing to go all out for. And this is one of those things. I’ve got a feeling that it’s gonna be my big break, and I’ve never really been off about things like these. Yeah, that Endou guy might look like a lying, cheating piece of shit, but in the end, it’s all up to me to win whatever there is to win, isn’t it? And if I lose, I’ve still got my whole life ahead of me, like you said. I’m only twenty-one. There are other things I could do to get rid of any debt I end up incurring. It’s a risk I’m willing to take. Aren’t you fond of gambles, Kaiji-san? Aren’t they thrilling? What does a guy like you or me have left to lose?”

For the first time in a while, Kaiji can’t think of any petty or rude insult to hurl back at Sahara. That’s because Sahara isn’t being his usual moronic self. Instead, for someone like him, he’s making a hell lot of sense. Kaiji think he’s long convinced himself that paying out his debt fraction by insignificant fraction for the rest of his life is the way to go, but against all the noise in the bar, against the warm, giddying yellow of the cheap fluorescent lamps, Sahara’s message is crystal clear.

“We’ll get out of there, Kaiji-san,” says Sahara, grinning. His eyes are alight, almost as if he’s daring someone to challenge him on it. “We’ll get that twenty million bucks. We’re gonna win.”


End file.
